Observations

Hello and welcome!

I find myself this morning feeling very reflective. Lately, I've discovered I have this pull to better myself, which I believe many of us have, especially at the start of a new year. At the time I'm writing this, it is midway through February so we've been in the new year for a while. But for years, I've been this person who looks for new beginnings in more places than just the start of a new year. I find waiting for a new year to start something new so very restrictive. I love a new month and, especially a new week, but I'm even finding those to be exceptionally restrictive in terms of starting something new. Why not start right now?

I feel as though God is bringing to my attention the fact that I am moving too fast. The world we live in today is so incredibly fast-paced. Technology gives us these quick doses of dopamine that just don't truly satisfy us and leave us hungry for more, so in an effort to get that satisfaction, we just keep going back for more. For me personally, I gave up most social media back in 2020. That meant disconnecting from Instagram, Twitter, and Tik Tok and in 2018, I decided to give up Facebook just while I was in my last semester of college so I could focus my energy on my studies. By the end of the semester, I was so relieved to not be so connected and reachable, that I decided to leave Facebook for good. While I do think that I may have to go back at times in order to keep up with my boys' activities, that's all I do plan to use it for. But, I'm hoping more and more places will move to other apps or just text messaging to communicate events, which seems to be happening in some cases.

That was a bit of a tangent just to say, that, yes. I don't use much social media anyone, and I never post anything anywhere aside from on this blog. But, I still do use Youtube and Snapchat. I love YouTube, I think it's very entertaining and Snapchat is fine, I mainly use it to just talk to a few people in my life who prefer communication that way. Now as fine and dandy as that seems, I've fallen victim (like I'm pretty sure the majority of people have) to the addiction to short-form videos (AKA Tik Toks). Before these short-form videos moved from only TikTok to literally every social media platform out there, I could of course spend a lot of time on YouTube. But it was different and took more thinking. Now, with these YouTube shorts, I could. mindlessly scroll for hours and hours. It's honestly so bad. I tried ways to limit myself saying "Oh I will only watch this creator's shorts or I'll only watch shorts on the weekends" but nothing was cutting it. I was feeling anxious and like my brain just couldn't slow down. The comparison was creeping in and as a hypochondriac, seeing different ailments that people are dealing with, sent me into a tizzy. I knew in the back of my mind I needed to just quit them all together, but I didn't want to. I love them and enjoy them. But it really hit me one day, God was saying "ok this is enough".

Self-discipline is something I've been working on this year and even a bit before that even if I didn't realize it. And it's a very important thing for us as humans and especially as followers of Christ. In our society today, I really believe that self-discipline is pretty well gone. Think about it, for the most part when we want something, we can get it at the touch of a finger. Whether that be shopping, entertainment, or socializing. And this is a good thing at its core, but it's created an addiction and reliance that I believe is becoming very dangerous. I've taken note of its effects on my own life and wanted to share a couple of experiences I've had recently that's really shown me that I need to make some changes.

Like most people, I use my phone as my alarm clock. One morning I overslept because it didn't go off. When I did wake up, I grabbed my phone out of habit and it wasn't working. I knew it was charged because it'd been on the charger all night. I hadn't dropped it or got it wet or anything to my knowledge. It was just a black screen that wouldn't work. Now for me as a person with anxiety, I find myself the most anxious at night and first thing in the morning. When my phone wouldn't turn on, a bit of panic started setting in. Unfortunately, my phone has been my source of comfort, especially when I'm anxious, and if it wasn't working, how would I survive? I honestly felt my skin start to crawl for a moment. But it did end up turning on and the crisis was averted. When I look back on this, I just see a giant red flag.

This week I also decided on my morning workouts that I would begin a 30-day yoga challenge. I haven't done one in quite some time and thought it would be a nice change of pace. Well, the evolution of pace has been nice, but it's also been hard. The first day I was so antsy because it was moving a lot slower than the workouts I had been doing (like strength training, cardio, and pilates). I was used to jumping right in because I would only give myself 15 minutes max to work out, so I was going hard from the minute I started a workout. I wanted to give myself more time (most sessions are around 30 minutes) to do this yoga challenge. It just seemed like it was taking forever to do anything. I felt it was a waste of time to be moving so slowly. Again, another red flag.

Between these two situations and plenty of others, I knew something was wrong. I have an addiction to my phone and to the fast-paced, instant-gratification lifestyle, today's society creates. To me, that is terrifying. I think about my two young sons when I see older kids today. The need they have to be connected all the time and constantly be entertained is terrifying. I don't want my boys to be that way, especially not throughout their childhood. Honestly, I think years from now we as a society are going to look back and realize the massive mistakes we've made by pacifying children with screens and allowing them on social media from the time they can read. I'm not saying it's all bad, because it's not. But I think it's creating a negative future. The ease of handing your child an iPad is creating lazy parenting and also creating an early addiction for that child as well as (in my opinion) disobedience. That scares me. We try to limit screen time for our toddler and do pretty well most of the time. And would it be easier to hand him an iPad or let him watch TV so I can cook dinner without someone making a mess or screaming? Yes. But I think if we want the best for our kids and identify as followers of Christ (especially if we identify as followers of Christ) then we need to be doing the hard things to give our children a good foundation to start their lives on.

I'm not here to tell you my kids are perfect because they aren't. But I will say that being conscious of how we use technology and entertainment with our children does make a difference. We had some visitors stay with us for a bit one day last week and they were a bit shocked at and also complimented us on the fact that our 3.5-year-old could so contently play independently without the need for something else besides his toys and his imagination to keep him entertained. I think it's becoming rare in these modern days. I know even my generation is similar. I grew up in the TV age where in most homes that I knew, the TV was on all the time, thus giving a constant flow of entertainment. And that's just childhood, not even getting into the social media aspects of growing up for me. It was just normal to always have something to entertain you but at the time, you did have to wait for a show to come on that you wanted to watch. That's not the way now. My husband and I often joke about how our sons will never even know what a commercial is. Everything is on demand and I really don't think it's a good thing.

I certainly feel like this was all over the place, but as the title suggests, it is just my observations as of late. I feel this conviction to make changes in my home for myself and my children to reset us from the addiction of instant gratification and connection that this modern-day world makes so readily available to us. So that is what I'm going to do.

Thank you for reading.

Until next time.